Concerning His return to
earth, Jesus Christ clarified that it will NOT be in secret:
“Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go
not forth: behold, he is in the
secret chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out
of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming
of the Son of man be” (Matt. 24:26,27 KJV)

Paul
wrote that true believers will “caught up” when Jesus Christ descends
from heaven with a shout, a voice, and “the trumpet of God”:
“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a SHOUT, with the
VOICE of an archangel, and with the TRUMPET of God. And the dead in
Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air”
(1 Thess. 4:16,17)

Where
did the idea of a silent, secretive “Rapture of the saints” originate?
“The idea of a secret rapture at a secret coming of Christ had its
origin in an ‘utterance’ in Edward Irving's church [from a woman named
Margaret McDonald in the spring of 1830], and this was taken to be the
voice of the Spirit. Tregelles says, "it was from that supposed
revelation that the modern doctrine and the modern phraseology
respecting it [the Rapture] arose. It came not from Holy Scripture, but
from that which falsely pretended to be the Spirit of God." [S.P.
Tregelles, The
Hope of Christ's Second Coming, first published in
1864...] (Taken from The History and Origins of Pretribulationism,
by Dr. George Eldon Ladd. See also Ladd’s book, The Blessed Hope:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1956. Pages
19-60).

Who
first popularized the secret Rapture doctrine?
“His [British theologian John Nelson Darby’s] most striking innovation
was the timing of a concept called the Rapture, drawn from the Apostle
Paul’s prediction that believers would fly up to meet Christ in Heaven.
Most theologians understood it as part of the Resurrection at time’s
very end, Darby repositioned it at the Apocalypse’s very beginning, a
small shift with large implications. It spared true believers the
Tribulation, leaving the horror to nonbelievers and the doctrinally
misled…Darby’s scheme became a pillar of the new Fundamentalism” (The End: How it Got That Way, by
David Van Biema. Time
magazine, July 1, 2002).